Plural Verb Research Articles

Modeling variability in number marking in additional-language Spanish

We extended sociolinguistic methods of investigating variability to number marking on determiners and adjectives in additional-language Spanish in the current study. The participants were learners of Spanish who were pursuing an undergraduate degree in Spanish (N = 135) in either the United States or France, and the data came from an argumentative essay. We analyzed all cases where participants marked plurality on noun-modifier pairs (k = 1950). A mixed-effects model demonstrated that both linguistic factors and individual characteristics influenced the participants’ expression of plurality. The results provided evidence of the multidimensionality of number marking and contributed to knowledge about variability in additional languages.

Cumulation Across Attitudes and Plural Projection

AbstractThis paper investigates cumulative readings of sentences in which some, but not all of the plural expressions have a de dicto reading, i.e. sentences where the lower plural is interpreted in the scope of an attitude verb like believe. I argue that such cases represent a problem for existing accounts of cumulativity, because the required cumulative relation cannot be formed. I then motivate and propose an alternative analysis where all plural expressions are interpreted in situ: I expand the ‘plural projection’ framework put forth by Haslinger & Schmitt (2018, 2019), Schmitt (2019), where embedded pluralities ‘project’ to the denotations of higher nodes in the sense that the latter reflect the part-structure of the former and where cumulativity is derived via a compositional rule in a step-by-step fashion. I show that if the denotations of the plurals with the de dicto construal are analyzed as pluralities of individual concepts, which project in the afore-mentioned sense to pluralities of propositions, the data can be explained straightforwardly. This proposal differs from treatments in terms of collective belief that don’t appeal to pluralities of propositions ( Pasternak 2018a, b), in that it (i) arguably generalizes to a larger number of examples and (ii) links grammatical plurality in the embedded clause to the availability of cumulative readings.

Система глаголов падения в каратинском языке

In this paper we describe the verbs of falling in Karata, an Andic (<East Caucasian) language. Our research is based on the dialect of Karata which is spoken in the village of Karata (Akhvakhsky district, Dagestan, Russia). The semantic field of falling includes eight verbs. The verb t’araɬa ‘to fall down’ is the dominant one. It can be used in the majority of situations of falling. The remaining seven verbs are more specialized. They are used in the situations of falling which have special features. The verb karaɬa ‘to topple over’ describes the situation of falling from a vertical position. Some of the verbs can only be combined with special subjects of falling (e.g. only with humans). t’oraɬa ‘to drip’ and ͡tʃʷaχːaɬa ‘to fl ow’ describe the falling of water. The first verbal root, t’oraɬa ‘to drip’, describes the falling of small portions of water (e.g. of water drops). Furthermore, the root of this verb may be (partially) reduplicated: in Karata, (partial) reduplication has the semantics of so-called verbal plurality. The meaning of tʼor~t’-aɬa ‘drip~VPL-INF’ presupposes that there was a number of drips, not only one drip. The second verbal root for the falling of water, ͡tʃʷaχːaɬa ‘to fl ow’, describes the falling of water as a substance (i.e. as a mass noun). tort͡ʃʼːaɬa ‘to crash’ is special in that it implies that the falling occurred with a loud sound. It covers many falling situations, including falling from upside down and falling from vertical position. The verb χːeraɬa ‘to pour’ is used with friable substances (e.g. sand). baχːaɬa ‘to collapse’ describes falling with destruction of the subject of falling. Finally, giraɬa ‘to lay down’ specializes in falling of human subjects from a vertical position. Overall, there are two parameters are crucial for the system of verbs of falling in Karata: (i) a kind of the subject of falling (human vs. non-human, mass noun vs. countable noun) and (ii) a kind of the situation of falling (e.g. falling from a vertical position or falling with destruction of the subject of falling)

The place of ad hoc categories within the typology of plural expressions

In this paper, ad hoc categories are assigned a place among plurals. It is shown that they fall into the same subtypes that other plural expressions do: they may be based on similarity or contiguity and, like other plurals, at least some of their forms tend to involve humans. Ad hoc categories differ from other plurals in that they involve partial rather than complete lists and thus they fill a systematic gap in the typology of plurals.

Types of Predicates in Polotsk Letters

The article discusses the types of predicates, the ways of their expression, and also their functional features in the Polotsk Letters, which are a part of a set of documents known as the Polotsk Charters. It is established that there are simple verbal predicates, compound verbal predicates, and compound nominal predicates in the Polotsk Letters. All of them are expressed by typical morphological means. For example, simple verbal predicates are built up by means of the verbs having one of the 3 moods: indicative, imperative or conditional; coming in 3 basic tenses: present, past (perfect and plusquamperfect) and future (future simple, future difficult I and future difficult II); being perfective and imperfective; singular and plural; the first, the second and the third person; masculine, less often – feminine and neuter gender. The first person singular and plural verb forms, and also the second person plural verb forms are widespread because of the targeted nature of the analyzed documents. The use of singular or plural forms traditionally depended on whether the addressee of a document, the performer of the action described in the letter was individual or collective. In addition, the plural forms as verbal predicates are noted: 1) if the author of the message was a person holding a high, privileged position in the society, 2) when the etiquette formula your mercy was used, usually referring to a collective addressee. The verb forms in this syntactic function are variable as evidenced, for example, by different personal endings of verbs and participles with a final rear-lingual sound in the stem, absence or presence of a link-word in the perfect, etc., positional fixation in document composition. This is the first study of the morphological expression of types of predicates and their functioning in the Polotsk Letters. The results obtained will become the basis for a comprehensive description of the syntactic structure of both this genre variety of business texts and the entire collection of documents of the ancient Polotsk land. They will be used in writing the collective monograph “The Historical Syntax of the Belarusian Language: Parts of the Sentence”, which is being prepared at the Department of History of the Belarusian Language of the Center for the Belarusian Culture, Language and Literature Research of the NAS of Belarus.

A token-based investigation of verbal plurality in Lithuanian dialects

This paper examines the use of the verbal suffixes -(d)inė- and ‑dav‑ in Lithuanian dialects. Both suffixes express pluractionality, although of different types, and their distribution in Lithuanian dialects differs as well. Using corpus data, we find that in South Aukštaitian ‑dav‑ is rarer and -(d)inė‑ is more frequent than in East Aukštaitian; in Lithuanian dialects of Belarus -dav- is almost absent. We argue against the assumption that -(d)inėforms have extended into the domain of the past habitual at the expense of ‑dav‑ forms; a slightly higher token frequency of -(d)inė‑ in South Aukštaitian seems to apply irrespective of any particular tense. We also argue that only token-based analyses can substantiate claims concerning areal distribution of certain grammatical forms and constructions.

Types of pluractionality and plurality across domains in ʔayʔaǰuθəm

In this paper, we examine two markers of verbal plurality, C1C2 reduplicationand ablaut, in PayPaju8@m, a Central Salish language. C1C2 reduplicationmarks event external pluractionality, where subevents are distributed in both spaceand time. It also applies in the nominal domain creating a plurality of individuals, butdoes not impose temporal or spatial distribution in the nominal domain. FollowingHenderson (2012, 2017), we propose that events are individuated through their temporaland spatial traces, so that events distribute in order to pluralize, whereas thisis not required in the nominal domain. Ablaut marks event-internal pluractionalitywhere subevents are grouped into a larger whole (Wood 2007; Henderson 2012,2017). While ablaut pluractionals typically involve numerous subevents that areclosely spaced in time, they can involve as few as two subevents and do not requirestrict adjacency of all subevents. We propose that they denote an atomic groupevent that is mapped to a plurality of events via a membership function (Barker1992). This contrasts with event-internal pluractionals that require a high number oftemporally adjacent subevents and have been analyzed as being grouped throughtheir temporal configuration (Henderson 2012, 2017), indicating that there is morethan one way to group events, just as there is more than one way to group individualsin the nominal domain (Barker 1992; Henderson 2012, 2017).

Pluralities across categories and plural projection

This paper proposes an extension of the class of plural expressions, a generalized analysis of the denotations of such expressions and a novel account of how they semantically combine with other elements in the sentence. The point of departure is the observation that definite plural DPs and and -coordinations with coordinates of several semantic categories share certain features — in particular cumulativity—in the context of other plural expressions. Existing analyses of conjunction fail to derive these parallels and I propose that and -coordinations should be analyzed as denoting pluralities (of whatever kind of semantic object their conjuncts denote). This, in turn, raises the question of how pluralities combine with other material in the sentence. I show that a simple expansion of the standard analysis thereof, which puts the workload onto the predicate, is insufficient. I propose an alternative which is based on the idea that all semantic domains contain pluralities and involves plural projection. In this system, the truth-conditions of sentences containing plurality-denoting expressions are not due to the semantic expansion of the predicate (as in existing analyses), but the result of a step-by-step process: Once a plurality enters the derivation, the node immediately dominating it will also denote a plurality, namely of the values obtained by a particular combination of the plurality and the denotation of its sister. EARLY ACCESS

Nouns & co. Converging evidence in the analysis of associative plurals

AbstractA morphosyntactic peculiarity that separates proper names from (most) other noun types is their ability to occur in a special type of plural, called associative plural, whose meaning is X and X’s associated person(s). In this paper, we apply a ‘converging evidence’ methodology to the analysis of associative plurals, by providing a diachronic typology of these plurals through the identification of the more frequent sources of associative plural markers that are attested in a sample of 80 languages, and by looking for emerging constructions for the expression of associative plurality in two corpora of English and Italian, two languages that do not have a grammaticalized way to encode this type of plurality. The analysis will show that associative plurals are likely to grammaticalize from a restricted pool of synchronic sources, and that these sources are mostly indexical sources and sources denoting the plural set, in accordance with the special semantics and referential properties of proper names.

Authority and Plurality in Muslim Legal Traditions: The Case of Ismaili Law†

Abstract Thoughtful commentators on Islamic law often point out that Islamic law exhibits great interpretational diversity. Typically, this plurality is evidenced by the range of opinions or articulations of the rule in the face of any question or issue. At the level of sources, accounts of Islamic law have often emphasized the reliance on a set of major sources or roots of law, with other lesser sources. Scholarly works have acknowledged that matters are more complex than this and that different Muslim traditions may employ a different range of sources. Nonetheless, source plurality, and in particular how this source plurality is expressed in minority traditions, is underexplored. Focusing on the case of contemporary Nizari Ismaili law this Article will help to demonstrate the expression of source plurality in Islamic law. In so doing, this discussion aims to enrich the understanding of plurality in Islamic law to include not only the plurality of answers or rules on different issues but also the plurality of sources.

In defence of Higher-Level Plural Logic: drawing conclusions from natural language

Plural Logic is an extension of First-Order Logic which has, as well as singular terms and quantifiers, their plural counterparts. Analogously, Higher-Level Plural Logic is an extension of Plural Logic which has, as well as plural terms and quantifiers, higher-level plural ones. Roughly speaking, higher-level plurals stand to plurals like plurals stand to singulars; they are pluralised plurals. Allegedly, Higher-Level Plural Logic enjoys the expressive power of a simple type theory while committing us to nothing more than the austere ontology of First-Order Logic. Were this true, Higher-Level Plural Logic would be a useful tool, with various applications in philosophy and linguistics. However, while the notions of plural reference and quantification enjoy widespread acceptance today, their higher-level counterparts have been received with a lot of scepticism. In this paper, I argue for the legitimacy of Higher-Level Plural Logic by providing evidence to the effect that natural languages contain higher-level plural expressions and showing that it is likely that they do so in an indispensable manner. Since the arguments I put forward are of the same sort advocates of Plural Logic have employed to defend their position, I conclude that the commonly held view that Plural Logic is legitimate, but not so its higher-level plural extensions is untenable.

‘When I'm there I get a sense of who I'm not’: The impact of family visits on the national place-belongingness of Welsh Muslims

While tense and contested forms of nationalism tend to dominate public discourses of national belonging in Europe, there is a need to explore in more depth the ways in which nationhood and ethnic and religious diversity continuously intertwine to re-create plural expressions of national identity. This article will do this by exploring the subtle, intermittent moments when people who identify with a religious minority mobilise their national identities. By analysing the family visits of second-generation Welsh Muslims to parental homelands, it will highlight how they use their attachments to Wales as a tool for situating a sense of national place-belongingness. When thinking about these mobilities, the participants negotiate what a sense of place means to them, revealing moments when belonging to Wales matters within their biographical narratives. By highlighting these relationships, this article analyses a bottom-up approach to understanding how ethnic and religious minorities experience the nation and argues that diversity and nationalism should not be treated as mutually exclusive entities. Rather, it argues for the need to develop more plural and flexible interpretations of nationalism, which highlight how diverse populations ‘do’ their national identities in ways which matters to them.

Verb Plurality in Kushi: A First Appraisal

Abstract It is a well-known fact that in Chadic languages the notion of verbal plurality falls into two categories: agreement plurality, where a plural subject requires a plural verbal form, and pluractionality, a form used to encode the iterativity (i.e. repetitiveness) or multiplicity (i.e. multiple effects on arguments) of an action. Kushi, a West Chadic language spoken in north-eastern Nigeria, presents both types of plural. In this article, I will illustrate the derivational strategies employed to encode verbal plurality in Kushi—suffixation, infixation, and gemination—showing the existing correlation between plural form and root shape (i.e. verb class). Interesting features of Kushi plurals are the existence of two plurality morphemes (one for non-subjunctive TAM paradigms and one for the subjunctive) and the quality of the final vowel in subjunctive plural verbal forms. All the data used in this paper have been collected in the framework of an on-going project of documentation and description of Kushi.

Refunctionalization. First-Person Plural of the Verb Haber in the History of Spanish

In this paper, the first-person plural diachronic behaviour of the verb form habemos with an existential value is analysed to explore its recovery in current Spanish as a case of refunctionalization. The latter is understood as timely cooptation of a form, which begins with any of the form’s characteristics. It is known that the cooptation’s origin might be directly, indirectly or not at all related to the previous or original use of the form. Results shown here are based on the analysis of constructions in which the first-person plural verb form of haber is used with a possessive meaning, as an auxiliary, and as existential between the 13th and 21st century. While grammaticalization theory pays attention to processes that culminate with grammatical enrichment of words or constructions, the verb form habemos with an existential meaning does not show that behaviour. It is explained as a case of refunctionalization or, at least, specialization.

LEXICO-GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS OF BLACK ENGLISH AND WHITE ENGLISH IN THE MOVIE AKEELAH AND THE BEE

This study aims at describing the lexico-grammatical features that differentiate Black English from White English as well as investigating the features of English used by both black people and white people in the movie Akeelah and the Bee. Descriptive design and qualitative approach were used to achieve the research aims. Data were collected through documentation method and analyzed by using qualitative data analysis technique. Data were listed, classified, analyzed, discussed, and summarized at the end. It was found a total of 82 data indicating the features that differentiate Black English from White English. Among those data, 45.1% data showed the use of slang, 24.4% data showed the use of optional auxiliary be, 14.6% data indicated the use of multiple negation, 6.1% data indicated the use of identical singular and plural verb forms, 4.9% data showed the use of aspectual markers: be, BIN, dən, 2.4% data showed the use of specific phrases, and 2.4% data indicated the use of negative inversion. Meanwhile, 11 data were found in regards to the features that were used by both black people and white people in the movie. Among those data, 81.8% data showed the use of slang, 9.1% data indicated the use of specific word, and 9.1% data showed the use of optional auxiliary be. The findings indicated that Black English has its own lexico-grammatical features which make it distinct from White English. However, there were some features of Black English which are used in White English. Keywords: Black English, White English, lexico-grammar

A Study on Mandarin Chinese Plural Verb Constructions

A Study on Mandarin Chinese Plural Verb Constructions

Scope-related cumulativity asymmetries and cumulative composition

Some elements in German and English, e.g. every DPs, give rise to cumulativity asymmetries: They allow for cumulative readings only if they occur in the scope of another semantically plural expression. We present a surface-compositional and event-less analysis of this pattern, expanding Schmitt's (2017) 'plural projection' framework. In this system, any constituent containing a semantically plural subexpression denotes a set of (possibly higher-type) pluralities. Cumulativity is built into the rules implementing this 'projection' of semantic plurality.

The online processing of noun phrase ellipsis and mechanisms of antecedent retrieval

ABSTRACTWe investigate whether grammatical information is accessed in processing noun phrase ellipsis (NPE) and other anaphoric constructions. The first experiment used an agreement attraction paradigm to reveal that ungrammatical plural verbs following NPE with an antecedent containing a plural modifier (e.g. Derek’s key to the boxes … and Mary’s_ probably *are safe in the drawer) show similar facilitation to non-elided NPs. The second experiment used the same paradigm to examine a coordination construction without anaphoric elements, and the third examined anaphoric one. Agreement attraction was not observed in either experiment, suggesting that processing NPE is different from processing non-anaphoric coordination constructions or anaphoric one. Taken together, the results indicate that the parser is sensitive to grammatical distinctions at the ellipsis site where it prioritises and retrieves the head at the initial stage of processing and retrieves the local noun within the modifier phrase only when it is necessary in parsing NPE.

Social pluralism on the air: Internet radio in Israel

ABSTRACTInternet radio stations that broadcast exclusively on the Internet are a growing phenomenon in Israel, providing a stage for new and diverse voices in Israeli society. This article charts the activity of Internet radio stations in Israel and evaluates their social contributions by focusing primarily on music selection, broadcast content, and target audiences. It shows that the establishment of Internet radio stations is connected to progressive trends in Israeli society. New and varied voices, not necessarily heard before in traditional media and especially traditional radio, have been given a platform for the first time. This makes Internet radio an important expression of social pluralism in communications media, which is essential and necessary for the healthy maintenance of a democratic society with so many internal divisions.

Variable agreement with coordinate subjects is not a form of agreement attraction

Abstract Agreement attraction (e.g., ∗The key to the cabinets are rusty) is not attributable to the linear proximity between the local noun and verb (Franck, Vigliocco, & Nicol, 2002). However, agreement with a disjoined subject (e.g., The horses or the clock is red) is specifically sensitive to the number of the nearer noun (Haskell & MacDonald, 2005). The present study highlights other differences between the influence on agreement of a local noun in the classic attraction configuration and the nearer noun in a coordinate subject. Experiments using a two-alternative forced-choice paradigm and eyetracking during reading show, first, that a singular second conjunct tends to elicit a singular verb; this influence of a singular noun contrasts with the lack of effect from a singular attractor. Second, in comprehension a singular second conjunct both facilitates processing of an ungrammatical singular verb and inhibits processing of a grammatical plural verb. This symmetrical effect contrasts with the lack of an agreement attraction effect in comprehension of grammatical sentences. It is proposed that variable agreement with coordinate subjects should be given distinct theoretical treatment, relating these phenomena to the cross-linguistic phenomenon of closest conjunct agreement.